Century of Waiting
by LJ Summers
Summary: New Moon AU. Edward could not believe Bella jumped off the cliff to her death. A one-shot of how he handled her death and where it led him to go. Rated for more mature subject matter.


**A/N: Occasionally, I go through my story-starts (yep, they have a file all their own on my trusty computer) and find something. This was going to be a long story but I found, when I got to a certain point, that there was nothing that I really felt the need to explore.**

**So I'm just posting it here. What happens after "The End" I leave for you to decide.**

******_This is a work of derivative fiction. All things TWILIGHT are the intellectual property of Stephenie Meyer and/or her assignees. I write merely to entertain myself and others and receive no compensation._**

* * *

I hadn't believed Rosalie when she told me. It had to be a lie. My Bella? Suiciding? Isabella Swan? The girl with enough courage to face down a psychopathic vampire even as he shattered her bones? The girl with enough fortitude to make herself a place in the midst of a family of vampires? How could someone so strong, so inherently good, take her own life?

_She couldn't bear life without you..._

I wasn't worth it. It was incomprehensible. To prove Rosalie wrong, I traveled, my mind bent on getting evidence of Bella's continued life and taking it back to show my so-called sister. I could not call her sister again, though. Not once I had the evidence. She was bent on torturing me or begging me to return – neither spoke of her love for me, though I knew she believed she loved me like a brother.

"She jumped off a cliff!" Rose had said. "Alice saw it, Edward. She's dead. Come home to us, please. We miss you."

"No!" I had ground out into the phone. "Bella wouldn't do that. She _promised_..."

_Oh, and aren't you the one for keeping promises?_ my own conscience yowled in my head.

Snapping the phone shut, I left the fetid attic where I had been...spending time...and made my way to the nearest airport. At the airport, after buying tickets to get me back to Seattle, I bought a camera. I would get proof of Bella's continued life and shove it down Rosalie's lying throat!

The determination kept the lingering terror at bay. _No, she's not dead_, I kept assuring myself. _Bella is a survivor. She wouldn't suicide. No. _

I reached Forks, though, and the terror broke through. Knowing I could be facing the business end of Chief Swan's service weapon, I still drove to his house to ask him. Tell him I heard a rumor and was devastated so could he please...

Cars. Cars were everywhere. Old and new, parked on the front lawn and up and down the street. Young people – my former "classmates" – lingering in front of the small white house where my heart lived...

I drove slowly and listened.

"Accident, is what they're calling it," Mike Newton was saying to Jessica Stanley and Angela Weber. Angela's thoughts showed me images of Bella... My Bella... Wan, thin, seeming absent from her body...

Jessica wiped tears from her face. "They can call it what they want. She just couldn't keep breathing anymore, once he left."

"I wish she would have talked to me..." Angela murmured, her voice thick. I saw images in her mind of Bella in an oak coffin at the funeral home, surrounded by purple satin...

It was true, then. My Bella was...gone. A sweeping blackness like nothing I'd experienced since my change overcame me and I knew nothing more for quite some time.

|::|

The first year was the hardest. It was the year of anniversaries. Every date had a memory attached to it. She and I had spent so little time together, but each moment was amplified in my mind. Her first day of school and the day I nearly killed her. The first time I crept into her room to listen to her dream. The day Tyler Crowley's van slid on the ice. Our first kiss. The baseball game. The day I almost lost her to James. So many, many memories.

The fifth year was the hardest. It was the year I think that my mind finally accepted her absence. That my body ceased spasming with longing for her. My heart – what was left of it – ached every moment of every day, but I finally knew that I wasn't going to be able to drive to Forks and see her. That Alice wasn't going to come dancing into my room with the news that she had seen Bella on the college campus and that it had all been a big mistake. The fifth year after Bella died, I lost that kind of hope. The kind that kept me breathing unnecessary breaths. The kind that kept me alert to the coming and going of my own family, prying desperately into their thoughts. Just in case.

The twentieth year was the hardest. It was the year that my family finally stopped babysitting me. I was reintegrating into their lives almost normally. They thought I was "getting over" losing my mate; though none of them had ever lost their mates, so they had no idea of the torment it entailed. I wasn't "getting over" anything. I had just decided to pretend I was. There was political upheaval all over the world that year, but for me and my family it meant little. Only that we kept to ourselves more than we had. Consolidating our resources. I was needed more than I had been in a while, to keep watch.

The fiftieth year was the hardest. I still marked anniversaries, but not the daily ones. My infallible memory was both curse and blessing. We adapted to the changing realities of our world, paring down our outward appearances and blending in...always, blending in... with our surroundings. We moved more often, for our physical perfections seemed more conspicuous.

The ninetieth year... We were about to enter another century. My Bella... I could still see her face, smell the luxurious decadence of her scent in my memories. I had been to the funerals of both of her parents. They had been my last link to her. I had been born at the dawn of the twentieth century. Bella had been born near its end. She and I had had our blissful months together near the beginning of the twenty-first century and that century, too, was nearing its end. It was no longer "hard" for me to live without her. It was the only way I knew how to...exist. The physical photographs I had had of her... They had faded. Her home in Forks had long since been demolished and replaced.

Nowhere was their evidence for the life of Bella Swan except in my own mind. She and I were alone in my memories.

|::|

A full century had passed since Isabella Marie Swan jumped off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. I marked the day that Alice told me it had happened. I sat on my piano bench and remembered her lullaby – I could no longer play it. I closed my eyes and remembered my mate. The girl whom I had loved with every fiber of my being.

It was another rainy day in North America. No longer was there a Forks, Washington welcome sign. The area was part of a consolidated treaty zone overseen by the expanding Quileute Nation. Carlisle said it was actually a blessing in some ways, since we still had a treaty with those people. A treaty almost two hundred years old, but still. The Native American people had a fine oral tradition and Carlisle was sure that the old stories were still told among them.

He wrote a message out in the old way. On real pulped paper with actual ink, he requested a meeting with either the senior descendent of Ephraim Black or the current Leader of the Nation. Alice and Jasper accompanied Carlisle and myself to the Territory. Esme, Emmett and Rose stayed at our current home in the North Central Territory, near what was once Saginaw, Michigan .

I had to laugh as we traveled. Old Science Fiction stories used to think that anything past the twenty-first century was sure to be ultra-modern. In fact, the reverse was true. We traveled on a train powered by a bio-diesel fuel for the long haul, and then our shorter journey was actually made in a wagon. Pulled by horses. Carlisle had commented often that he was more comfortable at this time than the rest of us. As a boy, I'm sure I rode a horse, back in 1910 or so, but it was also possible that my family had had an automobile. I didn't remember.

So we traveled in the wagon, paying for our way with gold, because it had intrinsic worth, worldwide.

When we reached the border of the Quileute Nation, we were stopped.

"Are you expected?" a tall young man inquired. He was easily six and a half feet tall, and he wore a pair of trousers and a buttoned shirt that opened at his powerful throat. His skin was a deep golden brown, his black hair cut close to his head, and his eyes were a strangely tawny color.

They reminded me a little of my own when I could use a hunting trip, but wasn't truly thirsty yet. Strange.

Carlisle leapt easily from the wagon, holding the precious letter of entrance he had gained from someone who called himself Chief Jacob Black. "We come at the invitation of Jacob Black," Carlisle said smoothly, handing the letter to the young man. "I am Carlisle Cullen."

At the name, the young man guarding the border stiffened, his eyes raking each of us with sharp distrust. I glanced at Jasper, but he just held up a finger. "He's surprised to see we're real," my brother murmured at a level too quiet for human ears.

The young guardsman shot us a glance and nodded. That was when I inhaled, careful to sort through the myriad scents that greeted my memory.

Werewolves. The gene must have been triggered by something. Not by us – we hadn't been here in a hundred years – but by others of our kind, perhaps.

Perhaps.

The young man flicked the letter back to Carlisle. "I was told you were coming. You don't mind walking, do you?" It wasn't a request.

"Of course not," Carlisle said, beckoning to us to come down from the wagon. "Let me just pay our driver and get our bags."

We took care of these small matters and hefted backpacks over our shoulders as the wagon rolled away.

"I'm Sam Ateara," the young Quileute man informed us. "Jacob said to take you to him immediately upon your arrival."

He set off at a slow jog that we all, of course, were able to keep up with. Soon, three more young men joined us, forming a perimeter. Jasper hissed, but a quick look from Carlisle hushed him. He had not been with us when we had formed the treaty with the Quileute, but he knew the stories, of course. Through the forest, we ran, over worn trails and under pine boughs. The scent of werewolf was thick around us.

After leaving the trees, we ran lightly along an overgrown path that circumvented the larger town and wound down to a piece of land that boasted two houses, one smaller than the other, that were humble in appearance, but looked well-crafted for all that as we drew near.

The young men who had been running with us slowed as we reached the wooden fence that edged the property. Sam Ateara walked through a low gate ahead of us, knocking on the door.

It was opened by a man who appeared to be in his late twenties to early thirties. He was almost seven feet tall and seemed to have been a body builder for the past ten years. He was heavily muscled and hostility poured from every sinew of his body.

"The Cullens. You finally came back." His contempt grazed each of us before his gaze stayed on my face. "Edward Cullen. Damn you. Damn you to everlasting Hell for what you did to her."

Taken aback in the face of so much hatred from a young man I had never met, I asked, "Did to who?"

He barked a laugh rich with derision. "Don't you remember? She only killed herself for you. I kept phasing. I never aged. I stayed who I am, the wonder of the tribe, just to see this day, Edward Cullen." He stepped lightly from the house and my family formed a line in front of me. I moved them gently aside.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Jacob Black," he said, advancing with his hands fisted at his sides until he was actually within striking distance. "The leader of my people. Son of Billy Black. You used to drive a silver Volvo..."

I gasped in shock and felt the surprise hit me solidly from Jasper. Surprise, shock, despair, amazement... So many expressions of our emotions hit me like a solid wall. "Jacob Black. How...?"

He snarled at me, utterly ignoring the rest of the family. Behind us, I could feel the approach of the other young men who had run with us. They fanned out behind us and my family moved to stand between me and them, leaving this confrontation with Jacob Black in my hands.

"How?" he growled. "I told you how. The better question, bloodsucker," he went on, his black eyes holding mine, "would be why?"

"Why?" I whispered, baffled but desperate to know.

"_I loved Bella Swan_. I loved her. _She_ loved _you_. And she _killed_ herself over you." He pushed me with one finger. Just one. It was enough to stagger me. "I was never enough for her, even though she was my whole world. I swore that I would be here when you finally came back, you parasitic freak. I promised her spirit that I'd be here, waiting for you."

"Bella..." Her name rolled off my tongue, through my lips, and out into the world for the first time in what seemed like forever. Behind me, Alice let out a cry and sank into Jasper's embrace. Carlisle cursed under his breath. Carlisle!

As for me, I sank to my knees and bowed my head. "I'm here, Jacob. Do what you must."

The silence was vibrating with tension. I smelled the heightened adrenaline in the young men around us. They could phase into wolves any moment now and that could conceivably be the end of my family. We were outnumbered and I certainly had no wish to defend myself...

I lifted my eyes to Jacob's and sought his mind. Rolled through the years and then, as if aware of what I was doing, he hunkered down next to me, his narrowed gaze calculated.

Images streamed into his mind, then. Pictures he had freshened in his memory over the past hundred years, I could tell. I saw his mental efforts to wait in each one. Details were fuzzy, but I saw Bella... My Bella... Pale and wan in the rain. Riding a motorcycle. Hiking. I saw my Bella in our meadow...! I gasped at the pain of it.

And finally, in an image much sharper than the others, I saw her body floating on the waters, her lips blue, her skin translucent. I heard Jacob Black's voice shouting at her to breathe, to live. I saw the efforts he put into purging her body of water.

And I heard him scream when she did not recover.

It was, to me, as if she had died all over again. Darkness overtook me.

**The End**


End file.
